According to a story in the New York Times, for many (foreign) street vendors, understanding the regulations that govern their trade is a really difficult prospect. Instead, the group attempted to design a brochure that uses as little language as possible to spell out the most critical pieces of the city's administrative code book. This graphical poster is the 3rd in a series of similar handbooks published by Street Vendor. The others are a guide to Social Security and a map of cargo shipping networks in North America.

A sample of this code-book-as-infographics can be found here [streetvendor.org, PDF]. Which brings me to the question: are such infographics really "universally" compelling, engaging and understandable?

Thnkx chino.

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2 COMMENTS

the city has defined five types of vendors here, the fifth being "unlicensed". nitpicky, maybe, but i saw that big "FOUR" and started counting across. five. way to confuse somebody with limited English skills...

Fri 17 Apr 2009 at 3:57 AM

ryan

Hey there, based on "side 2" of the poster I can see why this wouldn't look like a particularly compelling example of making complicated rules simple and multi-lingual!

The pamphlet is designed to fold out so that the first three sides that you encounter (not shown in the images you've selected for the site) are directed towards non-english speakers and deal with basic rights and regulations. The fully unfolded poster is directed towards advocates of vendor law reform and people who are curious to know more about the history of vending in NYC.

You can see the other parts of the poster/pamphlet here:
http://www.makingpolicypublic.net/index.php?page=vendor-power